: heh, I work at a UPS store, so I'm always having to block out bar codes and
: so on with thick, black markers, and the first thing I thought of when I
: saw the marker blackout (as opposed to a digital one), was that those
: images were screwed. it might fool computers, but no amount of regular
: marker will fool a human.

: i'm just annoyed that I wasn't the first to get my results up....oh well.

: but at any rate, I use something better than mspaint (aherm) and I messed
: with the brightness and contrast of each one, before I blew them up to
: 500% using the default smartsize, and then running a high-pass sharpen,
: resulting in these barely readable images:

:

:

: now, the last one is still basically unreadable:

: I've tried various things like "cortana" "attack"
: "cutscene" "outskirts" and nothing seems to fit. For
: anyone else who would like to give it a shot, the font that they use is
: Arial, italicized, and when I did it was ~11pt font. yes, I actually
: overlaid text on top of it; it worked smoothly for "waste" and
: so on, and perfectly for "030_outskirts" on the first page,
: which was how I figured the font style.

: I also tried splitting the image to RGB, and found that the red was slightly
: clearer.

:

: i'm still stumped on that last one, but maybe this will help others.

First one looks like "040_voi", last one looks like "070_waste" or "070_west".